


treacherous

by anthropologicalhands



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fantasizing, Mentioned - Rebecca/Josh, Rebecca tries to convince herself of certain things, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 20:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15155444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/pseuds/anthropologicalhands
Summary: Rebecca may have an active fantasy life, but that doesn't mean that everything she imagines is really what she wants.





	treacherous

Rebecca Bunch knows too many things, and what she doesn’t know, she extrapolates.

What she can’t extrapolate, she spins.

What she can’t spin, she makes up.

Now she likes her imagination, don’t get her wrong. It’s gotten her through bullying, her parents’ divorce, a string of truly awful boyfriends and years climbing ladders in a high-powered career that was hollowing her inside-out. It has been an invaluable friend to her.

It is also untamable, irreverent, and at times a complete and utter bitch.

Especially when it combines with her libido: the resulting sucker punch of images that flood her brain are vivid, lurid, and impossible to ignore. Sure, the wealth of detail means it can be more than a little thrilling to put her fantasies into practice and she would welcome them, even, if Josh was the sole focus.

And while she could say with at least eight-five percent certainty that at least ninety-three percent of her fantasy space has been devotedly entirely to Josh these last few weeks, that remaining seven percent gets _contrary_.

Her heart may only be for one man, but Rebecca has eyes, and they can see that the new boss is rather good-looking. Conventionally handsome: that’s the term she prefers. She wouldn’t go as far as Paula does, calling him a dreamboat, but she does understand where it comes from. Not that she can see it, personally. But she can understand where others might get the idea.

Unfortunately, the distinctions don’t seem to matter to her imagination.

And that gets…complicated.

Because when it gets down to it, Rebecca doesn’t want to look at Nathaniel as anything other than a vaguely annoying corporate machine that blinks disapprovingly at her when she comes into the office two hours late or turns in paperwork right under the deadline. Certainly not as a fellow human being. It’s just so much easier to think of him as a WASPy robot with a weird water polo function. Or better, as a Ken doll: plasticky and sexless and ultimately forgettable. Lawyer Ken, with stupid Oedipus complex catch phrases and swappable ties that would quickly be deemed a choking hazard and discontinued.

Except no Ken doll that she’s seen has ever had particular expression of knife-edge keenness, instead the traditionally vacuous smile, so even as soon as she comes up with the metaphor it collapses on itself.

At least he’s usually ensconced in his office, out of sight and out of mind.

In theory.

But then at odd moments, very odd moments, she imagines being in the room with him, reaching across his desk to pull his tie loose, undoing the first few buttons of his dress shirt to expose his throat and the lines of his collarbone.

As her fantasies go, it’s extremely tame, scarcely worth the title of ‘fantasy’. But it still makes her toes curl and both the nape of her neck and her cheeks grow warm. She shakes it off, tells herself that something he’s done is annoying her and she’s just piqued enough to think about sinking a pen into his jugular again.

And then thoughts like those just circle right back to the whole squirrel leap incident and its repercussions.

True, no disciplinary action was taken. In fact, Nathaniel seems determined to forget that it happened altogether and Rebecca is more than happy to follow his lead, maintaining a very professional and appropriate distance between them at all times.

But if she had restrained herself, she wouldn’t have any idea about the breadth of his chest or the sensation of his body shifting under hers as they struggled, or even the firmness of his grip and how his fingers completely encircled her wrists.

But she knows those things _now_ , no matter how unwittingly as that knowledge was obtained. And her treacherous imagination, which can sustain entire narratives from fleeting nanoseconds of human contact, and has for years, happily extrapolates new scenarios with obscene glee: how a touch _here_ easily translates to one _there_ , how expressions of pleasant surprise might, in a more intimate setting, morph into ones of pleasure.

It’s like her imagination is working on a jigsaw puzzle when she’s not paying attention and every time she blinks new pieces are being added without her being aware that she had them in the first place.

It isn’t a great feeling. The appeal of irrelevant fantasies is supposed to be that they are silly and insubstantial and absolutely without _any_ kind of basis in reality, none of these anchors that sometimes make her squirm in her seat.

And, _more to the point_ , she’s with her soulmate now. She’s supposed to be above this.

Right?

Isn’t she supposed to be so blissfully happy that no one else can get in her head?

She won’t stand for this kind of hostile takeover, so Rebecca takes other measures to try to turn her imagination back to her own advantage.

She tells herself that Nathaniel’s one of those alpha-male businessmen who is so wound up that he would finish in two seconds. That he would have no idea where her clitoris is and that if there was a parallel universe where she wasn’t with Josh Chan and they slept together, the experience would rank among the lowest of the low, right down there with Audra Levine’s husband.

(Though not _quite_ as low as Audra Levine’s husband—she’s not _that_ deluded.)

The best unsexy scenario she devises is the one where he insists on being called by his full name in bed, numerals and all. It’s so absurd that she nearly breaks down right in the middle of an important meeting and has to play it off as an asthma attack. They get the client, so Nathaniel is too pleased to question it, but Paula checks her forehead afterwards, asking if she feels delirious, and keeps shooting her weird looks for the rest of the afternoon.

Still, they do end up working, to some degree, allowing her more mental room to bask in her relationship with Josh.

…Until she’s distracted from her usual fantasies of Josh because her mind is suddenly occupied by _doubts_ of Josh, which is much worse. Those are persistent and insidious, and cannot be easily reasoned away, shaking the foundation of all her hopes for a better future, leaving her unmoored, because why isn’t he making her happy? What is she doing wrong?

Thank goodness it’s only temporary, vanquished for good when Josh makes it right, makes her dream-of-dreams come true, by asking her to marry him. Then, Rebecca isn’t just lost in her head –she’s up in the clouds, walking on air, far beyond mortal concerns. Everything is going to be perfect. There will be no more moments of shaken faith or inconvenient flights of fancy.

At least, that’s what supposed to happen.

Something is still off. Like she’s not completely immersed in her new reality, like the feelings of joy and happiness and pure contentment with her and Josh’s engagement have not quite settled in.

It’s almost a welcome explanation when the Santa Ana winds sweep through West Covina, littering the streets, and making everyone weird. At least until they blast the conference room windows open and burst through her blouse, giving her coworkers an eyeful as she scrambles to refasten and dropping a new puzzle piece right into her lap when she catches Nathaniel’s wide-eyed, stupefied stare.

It’s still entirely mortifying, but beneath her epidermis tiny muscles are going taut and making her hair stand on end and her obscenely productive nogs are hard at work unraveling those old fantasies to knit that new expression right into them.

Even worse, that night Josh doesn’t even have the courtesy of staying awake long enough to distract her!

And of course, there’s that terrible sex dream. Terrible and _graphic,_ because of course all her unnecessary physical knowledge about Nathaniel gets appropriated and realigned in disturbing new ways.

She tries to take precautions, per Paula’s suggestions. After all, if she doesn’t speak to Nathaniel, or touch him or even look at him for the rest of the day and possibly for forever, there won’t be any additional fuel to feed this unwanted fire.

So of course the power goes out with the two of them stuck in a tiny enclosed space and their professional distance is all but eliminated under the emergency lighting and the long hours on the elevator floor. How easy for the fantasies to crumble under their heady reality.

She has the chance to pretend that the moment that almost was didn’t happen, but she goes and ruins it anyway, because she ruins _everything_. She kisses Nathaniel to get him out of her system, like her imagination is some stupid virus she can pass on to him to deal with while she rejoices in her newly acquired immunity.

…Except that doesn’t work, because no matter what she told herself before, he’s not a statue nor a robot and his mouth _moves_ against hers so now she knows something about how he kisses, too.

And she—she’s getting married. She doesn’t need that picture in her head, taunting her.

No, she’s ready to clinch her fairytale with Josh, as quickly as she can. Ready to finally turn the right fantasy into reality, with flowers and tulle and a view of the sea. Then her doubts will be gone and her imagination will stop going into overdrive, because everything will be exactly what she wants. And if everything is what she wants, then she’ll have what she needs, and she’ll be happy. These inconvenient thoughts about Nathaniel will dissipate into the ether and all of her burgeoning doubts about Josh will be vanquished.

And, again, she will be happy.

Rebecca assures herself that these things will be true.

**Author's Note:**

> One thing that always interests me about Rebecca is how she is very open and comfortable with sex and her own desires. But I'm not sure how it applies to her fantasies, if she isn't worried about fantasizing about other people or if, when she has someone, she's convinced that it's Not Right, that she shouldn't need them. We got some of that in 2x11 with the sex dream, but this is me trying to think this through, though what started as what was supposed to be a fun piece about Rebecca being frustrated about having Nathaniel in her head turned into a general look at her insecurity about her own happiness.


End file.
